Conservative writer Max Boot has had a major reckoning with his fundamental political beliefs and alliances since the rise of Donald Trump.

And in a new essay published this week in the Washington Post, adapted from his forthcoming book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, he explained how he came to realize that it wasn't just Trump that was wrong with conservativism — there is something deeply corrupt with the movement itself.

"It would be nice to think that Donald Trump is an anomaly who came out of nowhere to take over an otherwise sane and sober movement," he wrote. "But it just isn’t so."SPONSORED

He continued:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

One can disagree about the extent to which "high-minded principles" have ever been a serious part of conservatism. But acknowledging, as Boot does here, the extremist and racist features deeply embedded within the movement and ideology, is a rare but important step for disillusioned Republicans to take.

Boot notes that this tendency in the American right goes back to the backlash against President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II general elevated into politics by his battlefield glory who disappointed many conservatives with his moderate streak. Though he hardly embraced the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling that pushed for American schools to desegregate, Eisenhower didn't run from it — for which many racists never forgave him.

Boot reveals some of his naivete in discussing Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate of whom he writes: "Goldwater was not personally a racist — he had integrated the Arizona Air National Guard — but, like his GOP successors, he was happy to make common cause with racists in order to wrest the South from the Democrats."Report Advertisement

It's not clear if there is or should be a clear distinction between being "personally a racist" and making common cause with racists, a point which seems to evade Boot. In American politics, it all amounts to supporting white supremacy.

But Boot does recognize that Goldwater embraced an absurd form of conservative extremism, "making clear that extremism is embedded in the DNA of the modern conservative movement."

He added:

In 1964, the GOP ceased to be the party of Lincoln and became the party of Southern whites. As I now look back with the clarity of hindsight, I am convinced that coded racial appeals had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades. I never believed them. Now I do, because Trump won by making the racist appeal, hitherto relatively subtle, obvious even to someone such as me who used to be in denial.

At times, Boot is clearly far too sanguine about certain parts of the conservative movement, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan — to whom he credulously attributes an earnest desire to spread economic opportunity, rather than seeing the GOP leader as a demonstrated liar bearing the sole goal of empowering the most privileged members of society while abandoning the impoverished. But Boot nevertheless recognizes that whatever his idealized version of the GOP may be, the party as it stands is another entity entirely.

Like many others, Boot hopes that the November midterms will bring in a resounding success for Democrats, dealing a decisive blow to GOP government control. In his view, Democrats will need to thrive for decades to root out the corruption in the Republican Party before something can be built in its place.

But it's far from obvious what could emerge in its place without the appeals to conspiracy-mongering, extremism, and racism, that constitute the current version of the party. Without these elements, the GOP would be entirely unrecognizable."Reality.

What a lot of conservatives, like our resident slow-gear here, don't get is they think "Democrats" and "Republicans" instead of "liberals" and "conservatives."

The Democratic party has a bad racist past and a much more inclusive present because, in the past, they were more conservative and now they aren't. The Republican party has a much nobler past but a bad racist present because they used to be more liberal but are now conservative.

The parties switch around, but the core of it is pretty consistent -- conservatives tend to be racist.

Anybody who points to the Republican party as freeing the slaves and the Democratic party as supporting Jim Crow are hoping that you'll be distracted by the party and not look any further than that. What one should be looking at, if one's in any way interested in the truth and the facts (which most of the people who pull this gambit aren't), is which was conservative and which was liberal. If you do that, you see the consistency.

The South has always been conservative. That hasn't changed. Which parties represented which viewpoint, though, did change... or, more precisely, the people holding liberal or conservative views started to identify with parties more.

A long time ago parties weren't based as much on a liberal-or-conservative view. Eventually, around the civil rights era, the liberals sided with civil rights while the conservatives didn't. The conservatives in the South, who had been mostly Democrats because they were still against "the party of Lincoln," resented the rest of the party, which was more liberal, "betraying" them. For a while they tried to form the "Dixiecrat" party and that didn't work out. LBJ decided to do the right thing, rather than the political thing, and had the rest of the Democratic party back civil rights, even though he knew it meant they'd lose the South. Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the Republican party saw a political opportunity and seized on it and courted the Southern conservatives, who were happy someone wanted them, because they knew they'd never have any real national political power trying to form their own party.

Over time this made the parties more based on identifying with ideologies, and, as time went on, liberals began to flock to the Democratic party, while conservatives flocked to the Republicans.

Like a lot of things Republicans have done as a political gambit, it helped them in the short term, but it poisoned them in the long term. It did make the party into a party much more friendly to racists... because it was more friendly to conservatives. Not all conservatives are racists, by any means, but it's damn hard to find a racist who isn't a conservative. This gave them more voting power, but it also turned off people who were against racism; they weren't comfortable being in bed with these assholes. It's one reason I'm not Republican. Another political gambit that helped-short-term, hurts-long-term is courting the evangelicals. That gave them a big voting bloc, but now they have so much power that they've practically turned the GOP into a theocratic party. And because that's the life-support system of the Republican party, there's little they can do about it, even though the craziness makes a lot of non-religious conservatives nervous about what they're doing. And, that's another reason I'm not Republican. I'm not overly fond of the Democrats -- a lot of their stuff is overly idealistic and against human nature, and they can be wishy-washy about things... but, they're the only place left to go if you're damn sure not gonna be in a party with white supremacists or crazy Christian-version-of-jihadis.

Anyway, people are only going to get confused if they think of history in terms of parties, because parties aren't consistent over time. Realize you're thinking about conservative and liberal instead, and things become much clearer, because that's remained consistent even though the party affiliations haven't.

PkrBum wrote:Except of course there are plenty of examples of racist theocratic liberals like Jeremiah Wright and Muslim clerics.

I don't know if Jeremiah Wright is particularly liberal. But I do know Muslim clerics aren't liberal in the least. Fundamentalist Islam is about as hardcore conservative as anything gets. Listing Muslim clerics as "liberal" is so absurd that I have to wonder if you understand the basics of anything.

Y'all would do much better to work on critical and objective thinking... and read some neutral shit occasionally.

I don't think anybody needs any advice from you about anything, pudwhack, especially on how to think. You show ZERO evidence of critical thinking -- you just swallow up right-wing defenses of anything like a dust-buster. You definitely aren't objective, because your reactionary nature is completely predictable. To find out your stance on anything, all anyone has to do is see what anyone on your idea of "the left" -- i.e. anyone who isn't a hardcore right-wing dimwit -- thinks about it, and you will invariably believe the opposite. Of course, you'll still say that you "don't really like" whoever you're so staunchly defending, because you're too big a moral coward to actually stand for anything. That's why you're "libertarian," so you'll never actually have to be responsible for electing anyone.

I read neutral things all the time (and your suggestion of that, after posting drivel from Townhall, is oblivious self-pwnage at its most hilarious).. it's just that the truth seems "biased" against you because you never turn out on the correct side of it. Everything you believe is wrong and stupid... because you're a goddamned moron. And, what's most burdensome to everyone around you, you don't realize you are one.

Honestly, I don't think you really think at all -- you show no evidence of composing anything on your own. All you ever really do is re-post links to things other people wrote because you don't seem capable of looking at data and formulating your own thoughts. You don't know what you think -- so you just regurgitate what other people think so you can pretend you're "participating." Right or wrong, at least everyone else here expresses their own thoughts, makes their own arguments. Everyone here is better at this than you are, so... why would anyone want advice from you?

You aren't any kind of thinker... you're just a See 'n' Say for Hannity scraps. You just post links from some specious conspiracy site, say a few words you don't seem to even understand the meanings of but that you think "sound smart," and then repeat one of five or six phrases from your extremely limited supply of weak taunts -- "gawd you're easy" or "comrade" or "leftist-talking point" blah-blah blah. They weren't good in the first place and they were all worn out years ago, but you keep using them because you can't come up with anything of your own, they're all you have. So you just repeat them, like a parakeet, and then you're done. Over and over, for years, a nonstop, completely predictable bore. You -- unlike everyone else on this board, right or left -- contribute nothing to any discussion other than an unwelcome distraction from it.